Assisi

Assisi is the furthest out of Lucca that we traveled. It is a small hill town in Umbria (also one of the few times we left Tuscany this trip!) It is the birthplace of Francesco Bernardone who later became Saint Francis. Francis founded the men’s Order of Friars Minor and the women’s Order of Saint Clare. Pope Gregory IX canonized Francis in 1228. Along with Saint Catherine of Siena, he was designated patron saint of Italy. He later became associated with patronage of animals and the natural environment.

As you walk through Francesco’s home town, you find loving tributes (and tacky tourist traps) to his life everywhere…where he was baptized, a shirt he wore, a hill he prayed on, a church where a vision changed his life. You can see it all.

Not going to lie, the glow-in-the-dark rosaries and bobble-head friars made me giggle. But even more so, I loved walking through the lanes that offered little pockets of serenity (even with a 6 year old & 2 year old in tow!). I can understand how Francis developed his message of slowing down and enjoying life from seeing the city he lived in (even if he may not have had a gelato shop on every corner in his day).

We started in the cobbled lanes of the town.

Then walked to the old Roman Amphitheater.

Then back into the streets of town. Where someone tried to invite herself in to every house she saw by climbing on their steps and pointing at their doors.

We then stopped at the Cathedral of San Rufino where both Saints Francis and Clare were baptized in 1181 and 1194, respectively. Francis also became a teacher in the church where at one point he taught classes attended by Clare.

There is glass in the floor of the nave of the church showing the foundations preserved from the ninth-century church that once stood here. After an earthquake in 1997, they checked the structural integrity of the building by looking under the paving stones. It was then that they discovered graves previously undetected in the last century and under that level Roman foundations and animal bones which suggests there may have been a Roman temple here which had animal sacrifices.

We continued through town, stopping for pizza lunch (of course, could we eat anything other than pizza on this trip?)

you’ll have to take my word for it that there was pizza on this plate at one point

We finally made it to the Basilica of St. Francis

In the lower basilica is the tomb of Saint Francis.

His remains were buried secretly while the basilica was under construction, and over the next 500ish years people forgot exactly where they’d hidden them. In 1818 they decided to open the tomb to the public, but it then took them over a month to actually find his remains in the tomb.

From the lower basilica you can climb up two sets of winding stairs to the upper basilica. The two are almost completely separate buildings both in structure and style. This section started construction in 1228 and is considered the first Gothic church in Italy. A series of frescoes line the walls of the nave and act almost as wallpaper with scenes of Francis’ life.

A walk back to our car through the outer road led us through the views of the countryside.

And eventually off to dreamland